Iran's nuke program must be stopped

The Obama administration has pursued a foreign policy that ranges from feckless to reckless, from pursuing fantasies like a global nuclear summit to acts of genuine irresponsibility, like diminishing longstanding relationships with allies like Poland, Israel and Britain.

But of all the national security imperatives facing the administration, none is more critical than preventing Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, from developing nuclear weapons. Now President Barack Obama’s actions have actually made the situation more dangerous, not less so.

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Obama pledged during the 2008 presidential campaign to negotiate with Iran without preconditions, a naive and utopian promise that has yielded predictably disappointing results.

On taking office, as part of a diplomatic offensive, Obama videotaped a greeting to the Iranian people for Nowruz, the 12-day holiday marking the New Year in Iran. Tough talk about Iran’s nuclear program would wait.

Months passed. In June, the Iranian regime rigged an electoral victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shot protesters in cold blood and arrested others, sentencing them to the Iranian gulag in show trials.

Obama was slow to condemn the violence, apparently still hoping for Iran to voluntarily relinquish its nuclear program — even as Tehran boasted about its uranium enrichment progress. Obama finally set a deadline of Dec. 31, 2009, for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis. The deadline has come and gone with no response from the United States.

The time for delay is over.

Despite sitting atop some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government lacks sufficient refinery capacity to turn that oil into the gasoline, diesel and other fuels it needs.

The House and Senate have overwhelmingly passed, with bipartisan support, sanctions bills to curtail shipments of gasoline and other refined petroleum products into Iran. This could force the regime to focus on long-ignored conventional energy problems instead of pursuing nuclear capabilities. The bills passed unanimously in the Senate, and with only 12 “no” votes in the House.

In a shocking act of negligence, the Obama White House has signaled to lawmakers privately it does not want the legislation to reach the president’s desk, as the administration chases a false chimera of U.N. sanctions. So sanctions with teeth languish in a conference committee while Iran gets ever closer to possessing a nuclear weapon.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) should move these two bills out of committee and send them to Obama for his signature by Memorial Day — if not sooner.